Technology outsourcing company Accenture launched new services for testing artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
Powered by “Teach and Test” methodology to help companies build, monitor and measure reliable AI systems within their own infrastructure or in the cloud, .
Accenture’s “Teach and Test” methodology ensures that AI systems are producing the right decisions in two phases. The “Teach” phase focuses on the choice of data, models and algorithms that are used to train machine learning.
During the “Test” phase, AI system outputs are compared to key performance indicators, and assessed for whether the system can explain how a decision or outcome was determined. It uses innovative techniques and cloud-based tools to monitor the system on an ongoing basis for sustained performance.
“As organizations embrace AI, it is critical to find better ways to train and sustain these systems—securely and with quality – to avoid adverse effects on business performance, brand reputation, compliance and humans,” Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services, said.
“Testing AI systems presents a new set of challenges. While traditional application testing is deterministic, with a finite number of scenarios that can be defined in advance, AI systems require a limitless approach to testing,” said Kishore Durg, senior managing director, Growth and Strategy and Global Testing Services Lead for Accenture.
Accenture used its “Teach and Test” methodology to train a conversational virtual agent for a financial services company’s website, so that it could engage in accurate, unbiased conversations and know when to refer conversations to a human. The agent was trained 80 percent faster than previously possible and achieved an 85 percent accuracy rate on customer recommendations.
The methodology was also used to teach a sentiment analysis solution to evaluate a brand’s service performance by analyzing social media, news and other sources in real time. Having the right training data enabled the solution to correctly interpret sentiments in different contexts and domains. The training time for models was cut in half, enabling faster analysis and business results.
Accenture serves over 1,000 testing clients across more than 40 industries and is recognized as an industry leader in testing innovation.
